What's in a Reference Check? Everything.

Quality has fallen by the wayside as a priority in staffing. It’s time we place it front and center.

Recruiting has always been about the power of connections. Making the match, finding the fit, relying on wisdom that can only come from people. Even in the earliest days of staffing, the resume had limited utility: a single piece of paper that took a lot of time to prepare but said very little. And interviews, while valuable, favored the naturally charming – irrespective of their competence. That’s why reference checks were critical – those conversations with close connections who could vouch for a candidate’s ability to do the job.

The process of calling references on the phone is a bit like using elbow grease to crank open a car window on a hot day. Something that was once ubiquitous, inescapable, but felt awfully mundane no matter which seat you were in. Nevertheless, it was an important motion. We as recruiters made sure we slowly cracked the window a notch to confirm that whatever we let in was cool air and nothing more. And in the absence of rain we felt, okay…we’re good now.

But times have changed. Recruiting has changed. While it’s always been a people business, by people, for people, the proliferation of technology and new operating models incorporating vendor management systems and rules-based automation tools have made it both untenable and unprofitable to slow down. The need for speed dominates our work lives, and to quote the inimitable Ricky Bobby, in the world of recruiting, “if you’re not first, you’re last.”

The question we need to ask ourselves is, have we sacrificed something of greater importance in this quest to operate at a breakneck pace? Is speed an objective, or the objective? Can we sustain our businesses and competitive advantage on speed alone? Was it ever really enough?

Here is yet another stark reality. Simple platitudes about the job market never mattered. It’s convenient and makes for a good headline to say that we’re perennially in a “war for talent” but we’re not, at least not in most sectors. COVID normalized massive overnight changes and investors have an appetite not just for radical transformation but for operating lean. Layoffs are the norm now, especially in tech and its adjacencies, and there are huge pools of qualified people desperate for a job.

In the meantime, some labor pools, even as demand normalizes post-pandemic, are shrinking under extenuating circumstances. No truer is this the case than in healthcare, where nurses and physicians are burning out at alarming rates and convoluted onboarding processes make the process of searching for a new role almost disqualifying in its difficulty.

In other words, change is accelerating, labor pools are both glutted and gutted simultaneously, and people’s comfort has become viewed as expendable, the latter of which is a reality none of us should accept. So what’s the solution?

Enter, again, the humble reference check.

The flaw of manual reference checking isn’t just that it’s a deeply uncomfortable process, requiring awkward phone calls to people who may struggle to organize their thoughts and memories on the spot, or that it takes way too much time and isn’t scalable. It’s that reference checks are an analog for candidate quality – the best one available, in our opinion – and doing them manually or through some transactional lightweight process doesn’t let that truth shine in any way.

A properly conducted reference check is an educated showcase of someone’s professional aptitude. It’s credible, third-party vetting of the quality of candidates’ work product, their ability to adapt to change, how they work with others. With a rating scale that’s designed to do more than just put someone in the category of “good” versus “bad,” we can create a sort of grade point average for a candidate’s ability to do well in a role and their most important professional behaviors and attributes.

And when we ask reference givers the right questions, in a way that is designed to elicit honest but kind feedback, it paints a complete picture of not just whether or not someone can do the job they’re applying for, but where their career could go in the future, how to engage and retain them, and how to maximize their productivity in current and future roles. It can unlock incredible insight, at scale, that can be used for any number of applications – from redeployment to scorecarding to teambuilding.

The reference is a window to the world of candidate quality. The insight from thoughtful reference checks conducted in the quantity that only a staffing firm could require is invaluable. It creates, at volume, a standard formula for hiring intelligence.

But what about speed? Especially in healthcare staffing, the advent of vendor management systems has made quality feel like an inaccessible premium. Of course it’s critical to place quality talent at the bedside but who has the time to figure out who’s an A+ versus a C-? Who has the luxury of losing a placement because someone else was unpredictably faster on the mouse click? Even if one could automate reference checks so that recruiters didn’t need to pick up the phone for an hour at a time and chase down information, if the solution doesn’t integrate natively with staffing-specific front office systems, who cares? It’s like installing power windows and placing the button that controls them outside the car.

That’s where RefAssured comes in.

RefAssured is a platform for automated reference checks built for, and by, staffing operators. It seamlessly integrates with every staffing front office system in existence, and was designed specifically for high-volume, complex staffing workflows. It works the way recruiters and candidates work, and puts the control in their hands, with a mobile-first experience, a comfortable UX that feels rewarding to use, warm lead generation opportunities to turn positive sentiment into probable profit, smart security features that ensure compliance and prevent fraud, and ATS integrations so deep the platform might as well be sprouting tree roots.

We exist for two reasons. First, to solve a problem that really needs to be solved. Reference checks are mandatory for Joint Commission compliance and highly recommended in almost all use cases. Second, to make people feel more comfortable. And that’s arguably the more important of the two.

For recruiters, that means being able to launch a reference check and then move onto another activity that drives value, knowing full well that the references will turnaround in 26 hours, all necessary information will automatically write back into the ATS, and the reference reports and analytics will help them impress and retain clients.

For candidates, that means having control over their own destinies, choosing the reference givers who know them best, being able to add information easily and with no painful hoops to jump through, and being placed in a role faster than ever before.

And for staffing leaders, it’s having intelligence that can be used to grow the business, increase talent and client pipeline, stand out from competitors, and prove to clients that you are indeed placing only the best with them. Automate the mundane to elevate the human – the promise of a truly modern people business.

Is it time to open the window to potential with RefAssured?